Last weekend we bought a bunch of lilies in bud from the flower market. Yesterday they suddenly bloomed and have flooded the flat with scent. It’s a heavy, heady fragrance, and I feel that there was a book in which it was called the scent of death. I think maybe they are commonly used in […]
News of a lockdown
So Pakistan is now also in lockdown, after days and weeks of ostrichism and prevarication. I have one sister in Islamabad, by herself in a flat in the Diplomatic Enclave; another outside the enclave, a father mostly by himself (though, happily, his house help returned from vacation just in time, hopefully not bringing the pest […]
Slight untilt
After the heightened worry of the day before, yesterday felt a little calmer. Not that things were much better. My possibility of return to Pakistan has been blocked as the government has put in a requirement that all travellers be formally cleared of coronavirus in the day before travelling, which is just closing borders without […]
Wobble wobble
The world wobbles on its axis. Strange that there is nothing outside this current crisis. When I did humanitarian work in the past there was always something outside it. Here there is nothing outside, no escape for any of us. The GF and I have had a few conversations on what we should do. The […]
Doubting Dalrymple
A very interesting review of William Dalrymple’s latest, on the rise of the East India Company, in the LA Review of Books. Articulates my vague unease about his school of post-imperial wokeness that is so popular amongst the chattering Pakistani readership.
Saul returns
We watched the first episode of the new season of Better Call Saul last night. Very promising, particularly as I found the last season a bit flat. I was pleased in particular that I could follow much of the Spanish – I had thought I’d forgotten all of it. Otherwise it was a quiet sort […]
Fallout
A bit of Brexit fallout already as I hear that a relative by marriage, a French national, has had her application for indefinite leave to remain in the UK (with a British spouse and two British children) declined because she didn’t have proof she was in the country during the period of her maternity leave […]
Morning after
So Britain has left Europe, and like millions of others in the UK, Europe and beyond, I feel an inestimable sadness. I became a UK citizen only about seven years ago, and lived in the UK only about 11 years in total, and in all this time the European Union was a shining light that […]
Sad day
Today.
Kya dekhein
I was saddened, no, enraged, by a podcast which claims to be about Urdu poetry and which I had really been excited about. The first episode I listened to was about Faiz’s Hum dekhein gey, which I translated a few months ago when it was used in the Kashmir protests. It’s being used in protests […]